Overnight in Bangkok

This photo is literally straight out of the camera. I looked out
the window in Chiang Mai, lifted my phone, and snapped
this shot. I didn't adjust anything -- didn't even crop it.
The brilliant sky was probably partly due to pollution.

Our options for getting from Chiang Mai to Chang Khan were to make a way-too-tight connection in Bangkok, at DMK (too tight because we'd have to get our bags and check in again, thanks AirAsia), or to stay overnight. Maybe it's just because he knows I am always soooo anxious about things like that, Marc found a place right next to the airport in Bangkok for a short overnight stay and then out the next morning.

It's a true marvel that after all the traveling we've done, relying solely on Marc's ability to do research and investigate reviews of hotels and restaurants, probably 99.9% of these places have been almost exactly what we anticipated, whether that was an amazing stay/meal, or a good-enough-for-the-purpose stay/meal. I do always think it's extraordinary, and a testament to his willingness to spend hours and hours (and hours and hours) studying everything available until he finds just the right place. He relies on extensive studying of reviews on Booking and TripAdvisor, studying photos, and thinking through all the possibilities. So that's the context, and I would've made all the same choices Marc made for this overnight stay except one.

The place he found, Dragon Hostel, really was so very close to the airport. We wouldn't have to spend travel time getting to and from the airport. Oh, the reviews! SO many, and so highly rated! Sure, the photos showed a small room, but that's so often what we do in transitions like this. (The Lilac Relax in Bangkok, for example, has served our purposes very well.) The guy at the Dragon told Marc how easy it is to walk from DMK across a bridge and then there's the hotel, no big deal. Six or seven minutes, easy. This never made any sense to me; like any major airport inside a major world city, the airport is surrounded by huge highways and flyovers and overpasses, and I could not even begin to imagine how we could easily and quickly walk from the airport across all that to the hotel. Couldn't see it.

SO, the getting-there. Turns out my sense of it was accurate: there was nothing clear or simple about it, no easy overpass, no "just walk here, cross there, walk a bit, there's the hotel." Eventually we made our way across one side of the highway and ended up at a train station, but we couldn't figure out how to get to the hotel. We stood there, at the side of a very busy road, and a lovely Thai man offered to help us. He got us across that road and looked at Marc's map -- couldn't figure it out -- so he helped us get a cab. That was more of a mini-ordeal in itself, but finally the cab dropped us off at the hostel. 

Now we've stayed in hostels before -- places called hostels that were much more like great places to stay. Hostel La Finca, in Colombia, for example, and one in Taipei that was kind of like a dorm set up for kids, but absolutely fine -- and this was not that. Hoo boy, this was not that. There were some Thai people kind of lurking around a doorway and I had to sign us in, noting the exact time. Then one guy took us a short way away from that doorway into another one, down a kind of dark side alley, into a room ("just put the key here when you leave tomorrow" -- right outside the door, available to anyone!) and then up two short flights of the steepest stairs to our room. Yes, we had our own bathroom, but not in the room. The room itself was super small, which by itself isn't the most terrible thing, but to me it felt so, so bad that I slept in my clothes, not wanting to touch anything. It's not that it was visibly dirty, it wasn't, it just felt really bad to me. Downstairs, where we came in, there was a little table with bread and a toaster on it, and there was a kettle in the room with complimentary instant coffee/tea, but I just wanted to get out as fast as possible. We went back to DMK, checked in early, and I got some breakfast and realized that I felt so shaky, that the experience had felt so, so bad to me, and part of it was that the place reminded me of the YMCA where I briefly lived as a homeless kid, but not as nice. There is no way Marc could've known any of that, not to mention how it would feel to me (hell, I wouldn't/couldn't have known that, either).

The flight to Loei was easy, and we got a taxi to take us to Chiang Khan, just under an hour. All in all I'm glad to let this transition slip from my memory, and just remember Chiang Mai and Chiang Khan.